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How to Choose the Right MSP for Your Business

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So you’ve decided it’s time to onboard an MSP! That’s great. But now you’re stuck wondering how to choose the right one. As the need for MSPs grows, so does the selection pool. Choosing an MSP is a massive decision and should not be taken lightly – the organisation you partner with should be knowledgeable and consistent with the inner workings and maintenance of your IT infrastructure. Otherwise, what’s the point in having one at all?

Extensive research and comparisons are a must when choosing an MSP. Think about it as hiring a new employee; you wouldn’t just choose the first person who walks through your door and talks a big game with no references to back them up. You probably have a serious vetting process, with multiple prerequisites and questions to ask, and a pool of several possible candidates. It’s the same with MSPs. There are plenty out there who make a bunch of promises, but are really just money-grabbers who lock you into a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with no intention of actually helping your business succeed.

The first step in choosing an MSP is narrowing down your options. A big deciding factor is assessing whether you need an MSP that is local to your business. A local MSP is able to provide onsite support and maintenance (particularly valuable for major IT emergencies), whereas MSPs that are not local will only be able to offer desktop support. Many businesses find that Helpdesk support is more than sufficient for their needs, so it’s really up to you and the level of support you believe your company requires.

Once you’ve made this decision, don’t just rely on Google searches to supply you with a list of suitable MSPs. Google doesn’t base their search algorithm on company reviews, nor does it base it on an MSPs competence as a suitable partner for your business. On top of Google searches, we recommend visiting CloudTango, particularly their MSP50 page, which lists the Top 50 MSPs in 8 different countries (including Australia).

After you’ve narrowed down your search a fair bit, do a thorough check into each MSP’s reviews, testimonials, and case studies. Look through their website and read through their pages; are they informative and transparent? If these all check out, you can move on to assessing their suitability.

 

1. Clear Communication

One of the most important things to note when choosing an MSP is how and when they communicate. If they are taking a while to respond to emails or calls when you begin contact, it may mean they are too busy to respond or that they are inconsistent when it comes to communication with their clients. This could potentially cause issues down the line when you are facing an IT emergency, and no one is answering the phone or responding to your support requests.

Secondly, the biggest benefit of onboarding an MSP is the fixed monthly costs, but inferior MSPs may try to slip hidden costs into your agreement. Thoroughly check your SLA before signing! Are there any hidden costs? Do they charge extra for onsite visits? What happens when your equipment needs to be upgraded or replaced? A quality MSP will be upfront with these costs, and will happily answer any questions you have about your SLA and modify it to suit your requirements.

 

2. Adaptability

As your business grows, so will your technology, software and IT support needs. One of the biggest benefits of partnering with an MSP is that you won’t need to hire more IT technicians to keep up with the demands of your growing IT infrastructure.

However, an inexperienced MSP may not have the capacity to support you as your business and IT requirements expand. Before signing on, ensure that your MSP is flexible, able to easily scale their support, and can quickly adapt to new projects and initiatives.

 

3. Consistency & Knowledge

An MSP that is able to maintain consistent results and delivery is of the utmost importance. Your potential MSP should be able to provide case studies, policies, and procedures to back up their claims and prove they are experienced and dependable. If they are unable to explain what they do, how they do it, and why it is effective, then you should question their validity. In the same vein, your MSP should possess a deep understanding of the processes and solutions they are offering.

 

Conclusion

Deciding who to trust with your IT infrastructure is a daunting and difficult decision. However, doing the appropriate research into a potential MSP allows you to bypass issues that could occur in the future. Just remember, don’t be afraid to ask potential MSPs questions, and if they get annoyed or frustrated, move on.

 

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER ASKING:

  • What does their onboarding process entail?
  • Do they provide 24/7 support? If not, what are their emergency costs?
  • Do they have references, testimonials, and case studies?
  • Do they provide detailed invoices?
  • What’s NOT included in their managed service agreement?
  • Do they have a guaranteed response time? What is it?
  • How experienced are their technicians? Do they have relevant qualifications?
  • How flexible/scalable is their company? Do they have the means to support a growing organisation?
  • Do they provide onsite support, remote support, or both?
  • How often do they provide progress reports?
  • How can you get in contact with them when support issues arise?
  • What are their cancellation policies?

 

eStorm is a CloudTango MSP50 finalist dedicated to helping you get the most out of your managed it services partnership.

Contact our friendly and knowledgeable team today to discover how we can help!

Email: [email protected]
Phone: 07 3120 0640

Is your business ready for the Essential Eight?

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At the beginning of 2020, the Federal Government and the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) announced the Essential Eight (E8). The E8 is a strategy for businesses to mitigate cybersecurity incidents, protecting their systems against a range of adversaries.

What is the “Essential Eight”?

The ACSC has admitted that no single mitigation strategy guarantees total prevention of cybersecurity incidents. However, they encourage organisations to implement the eight essential strategies as a baseline. These mitigation strategies are also deemed cost-effective with regards to time, money and effort when compared to the resources needed to respond to large-scale cybersecurity incidents.

  • The E8 strategies are categorised into three groups:
  • Strategies to Prevent Malware Delivery and Execution,
  • Mitigating the Extent of Cyber Security Incidents, and
  • Recovering Data and Maintaining System Availability.

For more information on these strategies visit the Australian Cyber Security Centre.

How will the Essential Eight affect your business?

These new strategies are now a benchmark for any business or organisation who is required or aspires to work with the Government, Health or other contracts containing sensitive data. Whether your business is compliant with these strategies or is not is now a big factor when it comes to Government tenders, contract pitches and so forth. It is also likely that other big corporations dealing with data will also require their business partners to be compliant with the E8 before starting any work.

Complying with the Essential Eight

As a business owner or IT professional, your first task will be running an IT security audit and comparing your current system to the strategies outlined by the Government. From here, you will be able to identify your weaknesses and gaps in security. Your business can begin implementing the eight strategies anytime, and suggested approaches from the Australian Cyber Security Centre are available.

How eStorm can help

You do not need to handle or manage this change on your own. Our team understands auditing your current system and updating your strategies to suit the new benchmarks is not an easy task. Our friendly IT support team is here to help your business obtain a high-security standard, going beyond the E8 strategies.

Currently, the E8 strategies are heavily based on Windows-based systems. However, our team covers this and more to ensure your business’ IT is secure. Our broad services include Mac Controls, Perimeter Security (Firewalls and Universal Threat Management), and breach mitigation (honeypots and intrusion detection systems).

If you have questions regarding how the Essential Eight will impact your business or how to maintain high-security standards, the eStorm is here to help. Contact us today!

 

How IT Services Are Changing In 2019

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Technology and how we use it to achieve business goals and objectives is constantly changing. However, the majority of IT service providers are still tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that are outdated.

Measuring the success of IT on things like up time, meeting SLAs, targets of 99.99% availability and number of tickets resolved, while still important to track internally, aren’t necessarily relevant to C-suite goals.

99.99% uptime, often marketed as a unique selling point for most IT companies, isn’t a marker of success in this day and age, it’s just what’s expected. Adam Tallinger, vice president at healthcare IT consulting company Impact Advisors says, “You don’t necessarily cheer your plumber every time water comes out of the faucet. You for sure will call if you turn on the tap and it doesn’t come out.”

Uptime can be very useful, but only if tied to a result of the business. Availability is, of course, very important, but what people care about is how it impacts SLAs, or customer satisfaction when relating to website downtime for example.

Likewise, a lot of IT services companies take the perspective on a project’s budget and schedule adherence as the sole measure of it’s success. The issue here is that this view gives no insight into whether or not the completion of the project caused any business benefit.

Brent Rasmussen, CIO of Carrington Mortgage Holdings, says the business doesn’t fully benefit from an IT project until it has been fully adopted, business processes have changed, and it’s measurable and transparent.

He views staying within budget, like uptime, as “table stakes” for IT and says all your IT infrastructure layer needs to run all the time while being scalable and dependable so as not to impede the business.

So if these metrics and KPIs no longer prove the success of IT, what exactly should we be measuring as IT leaders? This will likely be different depending on what’s important to the specific business, which not only varies from company to company, but will also vary over time within the same organisation.

Organisational goals always change over time. One year the business’ primary goal is rapid expansion, the next year it could be profit maximisation followed by brand building. The only real way to decide on the relevant KPIs that IT should measure is to talk with business leaders and users about what matters to them.

 

How to discover what businesses really need

Consultation

User satisfaction is a metric that business leaders consider vitally important. Often times IT organisations will send out a mass survey with little preparation to users asking for support to gauge satisfaction.

Adam Tallinger, vice president at healthcare IT consulting company Impact Advisors says this is a mistake as it’s “too much data, too much variability among the people you’re contacting at a specific point in time.”

He suggests, instead of sending out a blanket survey, to build relationships with organisational and departmental leaders and discuss with them ahead of time how we’re going to measure ourselves in the future. This allows them to give direct feedback, as well as prepares them for your survey in the future after a relationship is formed.

 

“Why” your way to more insight

The biggest issues tend to arise when business leaders don’t openly communicate the organisation’s specific goals and objectives to the IT service provider.

For example, a business leader might only convey to IT that external customer user experience needs improvement. The reason behind the emphasis on customer experience might be that the business is attempting to increase its customer base, but frustrated customers tend to leave which causes churn—this isn’t always shared with IT.

The new approach requires digging deeper and asking why this matters, often multiple times to find the real business reason.

You care about availability—why?

Because users are happier

Why does that matter to the bussines?

When they’re happier they spend more time on site and make more purchases.

Having a deeper level of understanding of the goals and motivations behind business decisions can often lead to a better way to achieve specific business goals with IT.

 

Tying metrics to business results

Brent Rasmussen, CIO of Carrington Mortgage Holdings, spends time with clients and departments one on one to determine what projects IT will do for them, along with projected benefits to result from the projects.

This helps IT services to track the relevant time and resources spent on projects to maintain budgets. The new approach to IT partnership also determines whether the desired business results are achieved.

Through bench-marking previous projects we’re able to look at new solutions against baseline metrics to track effectiveness.

 

Choosing the right KPIs are important and IT leaders are ready to take their place as partners to business leaders to help guide their organisations into successful and secure digital futures.

If you’re serious about driving business growth and improving organisational productivity, talk with us today about how a partnership with eStorm can benefit your business.

Email: [email protected]

Phone: (07) 3120 0640

How to Submit a Great Support Ticket

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Imagine you’re going about your work day, everything’s humming along and you’re getting stuff done. All of a sudden, you run into a roadblock with your Office 365 or Outlook and your productivity is halted in its tracks. It might be that you’ve run into a totally new behaviour or bug that you’ve never seen before, or maybe you’re not entirely sure if you’re using a particular tool in the most efficient way. What’s your next step?

That’s where we enter the picture. We’re here to help you and we want to ensure we’re delivering as valuable of a service to you as possible. Regardless of how you choose to reach out to us—whether by phone or email—there are certain pieces of information that our Support Engineers love seeing in a ticket. These are the bits of information that help us to address your case in the most complete and efficient manner possible.

Subject Line

The subject line is important because it uniquely identifies and conveys your issue so that we know where we’ll need to start troubleshooting. The perfect subject line is a clear and general description of the issue that has occurred, which also includes what machine or device you’re using.

Example: Outlook not sending emails on Mac

Body

Greeting & name

It’s always nice to kick things off with a friendly hello and a name so we know who we’re helping.

Computer name or number (if known)

This information won’t be applicable to all businesses and if you don’t know it that’s perfectly fine as well.

Machine / device

Including what type of machine—such as Mac or PC—or device you’re experiencing the issue on allows us to assign the right Support Engineer to deliver the best result.

Description of the issue with steps you might have tried

Information will vary from case to case, but a good way to approach this part of the ticket is to describe what you expected to happen and then what actually happened. The expectation part is likely to be more detailed than what actually happened, but that’s okay! We’re looking for whatever general details you can provide on the behaviour you’re seeing and on steps you may have already taken to troubleshoot the issue.

Example: Marketing is trying to send an email to salespeople when a contact is assigned to them. All of the other salespeople are receiving emails fine, but they aren’t arriving for me. I have checked in the SPAM folder, but the emails aren’t there either. Why aren’t these emails coming through?

Whenever possible, our team looks for specific examples of the obstacle you’re running into. If we can find evidence of that issue at hand (or if we can recreate the behaviour you’re seeing), that gives us a great starting point for troubleshooting. The more specific you can get, the better. If you’re submitting an email ticket, consider attaching screenshots.

Contact number 

Including a contact number for our Support Engineer to contact you during the resolution process helps with timely resolutions, particularly in certain instances where remotely accessing your computer may be necessary.

 

When we put all the information together into a single ticket and finish it with a focused question, we can see a full picture of the case. With that information, the Support Engineer is able to accurately and effectively address and rectify the issue quickly.

At eStorm, we’re constantly looking for ways to pre-empt potential user questions, but there will always be a need for a live support channel to handle these unexpected roadblocks. By using the above advice you can ensure that you get back into action as quickly as possible.

support ticket sent

 

IT Support Services Brisbane

Headquartered in Brisbane, we provide tailored IT support services to suit your specific requirements. No matter the size of your organisation, our solutions include a variety of services that are critical to the successful delivery of business IT support.

Our Managed IT Support Services include Managed IT Services, Outsource Your IT Department, Mobile Device Management, IT Consultancy, Corporate Apple Services, Project Services, IT Audit and Review, Virtual CIO Servicesand Production Studio and Design.

If you’d like any further information, or to find out exactly how we can help your business – please feel free to call us on (07) 3120 0640 or email us at [email protected]

If you are located outside of Brisbane, eStorm can still help you.
Sydney: (02) 9188 5148
Melbourne: (03) 9088 6431

In need of our other IT support and managed services?

We specialise in Managed Cloud Services, IT Support Services, Managed Network Services, Business Telephony, Hardware and Software Procurement and Education Services.

Industry Standards: How does your IT provider compare?

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If you’re a non-techie who has been left to look after the IT department of your workplace, you may be wondering exactly how your IT provider stacks up in comparison to the industry standards of others in the country.




The following review will give you a break down of the industry standards across four categories: client satisfaction, service deliverability, IT spend and managed services cost.

1. Client Satisfaction


In August 2015, Client Heartbeat surveyed the clients of Australian IT providers to determine how happy they were with their IT provider. The survey asked clients to rate their IT provider on a scale of 1 to 10 across 5 areas: promptness, accuracy, partnership, advice and overall performance.




Here are their findings:




Promptness: 8.3/10

Accuracy: 8.3/10

Partnership: 8.4/10

Advice: 8.6/10

Overall: 8.4/10


2. Service Deliverability

Pink Elephant (the company who initiated this survey) collects, analyses and presents IT management metrics benchmarks. Between 2010 and 2012 a survey was taken by IT managers across the globe to measure the standards for incident, problem and change-management metrics.




Here are some of the standout findings:




Incident management


The report found that the number of incidents an organisation experiences is influenced by the organisation’s size, number of users and the number of years that the company has had an incident management practice in place. The numbers below represent an average of the total incidents per month during the survey period unless otherwise indicated.




First contact resolution: 74%

Incident maximum priority: 6%

Incident resolution within expected interval: 82%



Problem management


Problems with known errors: 48.8%

Problems Assigned Highest Priority: 8%

Problem / known error age at closure: 4.4 months (average of entire survey period)

Problems without known errors: 42%



Change management


Requests for change with no issues: 87%

Requests for change / right the first time: 90%



Among the several interesting metrics is an average 90% Change Executed Right First Time (no rollback or cancelation, and as scheduled). This appears to indicate that 10% of all Changes fail in at least 1 of the 3 ways, which is quite a disappointing benchmark.

3. IT Spend

According to research compiled by software security company Trend Micro, Australian small businesses spend an average of $52,100 per year on IT related expenses.




In the last year, small businesses with between five and 25 employees spent an average of $25,200 per year, while businesses with between 26 and 50 staff spent $20,600 and businesses with 51 to 100 employees spent, on average, $77,300 on IT.




The survey of 300 businesses found the way in which IT was managed across a business depended heavily on the size of the business, with smaller businesses more likely to manage IT simply on an ad hoc basis, and those with more employees more likely to have dedicated IT support.




Nearly one quarter of businesses surveyed said they had external technology consultants and channel partners provide their IT support, a figure much larger than other countries around the world.




Mark Sinclair, head of small and medium business at Trend Micro, said if small business owners have to manage IT themselves it can lead to inefficiencies and increased security incidents.




As a rule of thumb, if you’re spending less than 5% on IT, you should consider how important it is to your organisation’s success and how you can increase spending to at least 5% to take advantage of tools and services that will help you operate more efficiently.

4. Managed Services Cost

Kaseya surveyed 700 managed IT service providers to determine a few industry standards for pricing. Here’s what they found (in AUD):




Average hourly rate: $92 (level 1), $120 (level 2), $171 (level 3)

Average desktop support and maintenance charge: $51-65

Average server support and maintenance charge: $160-195

Average billing fee per user: 39% charge, between $65-130 per user

Average size of managed service contract: between $1300-6500

Conclusion

These industry standards should be referred when reviewing your current IT provider. Consider, are they meeting your business needs at a reasonable cost?




If you would like to speak with us about how we can effectively and efficiently manage your businesses IT, contact the eStorm office today.